Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur) (1952). Set in a declining oil-boom town somewhere in South America, full of unemployed foreigners who can’t afford to leave. The oil company hires four of the becalmed drifters to drive two trucks loaded with nitroglycerin through the mountains to put out a well fire. It is naturally predestined that only one of the four (played by Yves Montand) will make it alive. The first half of the picture, though slow, was rather interesting to me because most of the foreigners speak Spanish, French and English, as the mood takes them; I wonder how realistic that is. The drivers speak French throughout the drive: Mario and Jo because they are French, Luigi and Dutch apparently because they have French in common.

Kiss Me Kate (1953): some delightful moments such as Ann Miller’s dancing, and a gorgeous look, but overall ho-hum.

Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953). I saw this before (probably in 1976-7) but remembered neither the few great sight gags nor the utter lack of plot. — Is there a film by Jacques Tati in which a few objects, such as a flag and a balloon, are hand-colored?

Shane (1953). Classic Western, utterly without surprises. The little boy calling “Shane!” all the time got on my nerves. Shane makes two curiously clashing speeches at the end: to the cattleman he says “your way of life is over, and so is mine [gunslinging], and the difference is I know it”; then to the boy he says “a man has got to be what he is, I thought I could quit my old ways but I can’t, and that’s why I gotta ride on” – to what?

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Cleverest bit is where Jane Russell bleaches her hair and impersonates Marilyn Monroe. This film is remembered mainly for “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” – which, incidentally, is on my list of works that I first encountered long after becoming familiar with a parody, in this case Madonna’s “Material Girl” video (1984). (Another is Doc Smith’s novel The Skylark of Space (1946), parodied by Harry Harrison in Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers (1973).) A brief bit of “Diamonds” is also parodied, I now perceive, in Julie Brown’s song “Brand New Girl” in the film Earth Girls Are Easy (1988).

The Campaign for Dark Skies collects evidence that brighter lights do not deter crime. (Cited by Bruce Schneier; link updated 2006.)

Crisis on Infantile Earths – or – If it’s Tuesday, it must be Ragnarok! — a long and rambling essay by John Holbo

Have I mentioned lately that I hate applying for jobs?

They ask you to send a résumé. Then once they have it, they call you back and ask, “So what kind of position are you looking for?” because somehow their eyes skipped over where it says at the top seeking employment as a framistan operator. (I suppose that’s natural, since everyone knows a well-brought-up résumé says only that which can safely be ignored, like seeking a challenging position in a fast-paced environment where I can apply my superior communication skills.) So you recite the gist of what’s under their nose, and make an appointment to spend half an hour copying the same data, by hand, onto another set of forms.

And then, if it’s an agency, they call you back to say you’re in luck, you have an interview . . . and be sure to arrive a little early, because there’s another set of forms to fill out.

Can anyone go through this a dozen times and remain sane?

You’d think the HR industry would settle on a standard form so you can copy the repetitive parts. But maybe the process is designed to spot those who’ll snap.

The Master of Ballantrae (1953) is a swashbuckler done right; from a book by R L Stevenson. Technicolor, of course, though not as luminous as in Scaramouche.

Fifteen years after Robin Hood, Errol Flynn is my age, which gives me an idea.
Being indecisive by nature, I arrange my Netflix list by date, but I could instead arrange it by the age of the director or lead actor. I could even write a Python program to probe the Internet Movie Database for that information; I wonder how long it would take to go through all the titles from title/tt0000001 (Carmencita, 1894: “The noted dancer, who goes through her graceful act exactly as she does at Koster & Bial’s, New York”) to title/tt0500200 (Bernadette Peters in Concert, 1998).

The castle of “Ballantrae”, by the way, also appears in an episode of The New Avengers (1976).

The Fly Bottle: Crest, Colgate, Autonomy, Alienation, Not Voting, Etc.

The traditional Marxish theory of consumer culture is that the dark arts of marketing and advertising germinate within us ‘false’ desires. A false desire is one whose satisfaction serves not one’s own ‘interests,’ but the interests of those in the business of servicing (for a pretty penny!) the psychic ‘needs’ that they themselves have planted. So we are supposed to be wary of Nike, Starbucks, etc. lest we surrender our autonomy to the cigar-chomping moneybags. No Logo!

This idea has never done much for me. . . . However, I am beginning to find the Marxist critique quite pertinent to America’s duopolistic political system. . . .

Since the policy bundles we’re offered represent only a tiny slice of the possible range, they will only very improbably reflect most ‘authentic’ combinations of political preferences. Most people would be unsatisfied with the choices, and ill-motivated to vote. So the parties must implant false desire. . . .

I’ve got to say that it’s just sort of embarrassing to see the AdBusting, culture jamming, No-Logoites wandering my neighborhood armed with clipboards marching door-to-door plumping for John Forbes Kerry, as if Civilization Depends Upon It. . . .

quoth Paul Graham:

But VCs are mistaken to look for the next Microsoft, because no startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be the next IBM.

Tehee. In the same essay:

Because you can’t tell a great hacker except by working with him, hackers themselves can’t tell how good they are. This is true to a degree in most fields. I’ve found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent. The people I’ve met who do great work rarely think that they’re doing great work. They generally feel that they’re stupid and lazy, that their brain only works properly one day out of ten, and that it’s only a matter of time until they’re found out.

Why, that’s just how I feel! Do you suppose . . . ?

(Perry Metzger pointed me to Graham’s essays.)